282 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 40 



Snakes, without hands or feet to assist them in capturing and hold- 

 ing their prey, would seem to be at a considerable disadvantage. 

 However, they have evolved very effective methods. The quick 

 seizure of a victim with the mouth and the throwing of the coils 

 about it by some snakes is generally well known. However, many 

 snakes do not use this method of capturing their prey. The poison- 

 ous snakes merely strike their victim and bide their time, making 

 no effort to seize it until it has died from the poison they injected 

 with their hypodermic-needlelike teeth. Wlien the victim is dead, 

 the snake, beginning at the head, gradually engulfs its prey by 

 working the upper jaw and lower jaw alternately forward over the 

 victim. Those nonpoisonous snakes that do not kill their prey by 

 constriction slowly swallow it alive. 



The archer fish (Toxotes) regularly obtains its food, consisting 

 chiefly of insects and spiders that are resting on overhanging vege- 

 tation, by expelling a drop of water from the mouth which goes with 

 force and accuracy and knocks the victim down to the surface 

 where the fish can catch it. 



Most animals, like many people, are rather slow to eat freely of 

 foods with which they are unfamiliar. It is interesting to watch 

 them become acquainted with new foods. They usually approach 

 very cautiously as though confronted with a dangerous object, "snif- 

 fing" it carefully. Their "snifiing" frequently satisfies them in one 

 way or another. Either they do not touch the inspected object at all 

 or they proceed to eat it freely. Occasionally the taste of the food 

 does not appear to have agreed with the judgment of it based on 

 scent, and they quickly lose interest after taking a taste of it. An 

 animal's technique of eating a new food is sometimes amusing. On 

 one occasion I saw a kaibab squirrel {Sdwms kaibabensh) given a 

 section of an orange with the peeling left on it. He picked it up and 

 started to eat from the peeling side, but quickly realizing that that 

 was not the proper way to eat this new kind of fruit, he turned it 

 over and worked from the meat side. Thus he made a thoroughly 

 clean job of eating out the good portion of the orange. 



Fortunately, animal lifte is not as a rule destructive of its food 

 supply. It is true that a few animals, such as weasels and their 

 relatives, will kill as long as victims are available, but, in general, 

 m.ost creatures kill or harvest only what they actually need for their 

 own immediate food, or for a future food suppl5^ However, such 

 habits of storing food are generally not harmful to the plants on 

 which the animals are dependent for a living. For example, the 

 seeds stored by the little desert rodents will, if not consumed, sprout 

 and produce a new crop when weather conditions become favorable. 

 Likewise the nuts harvested and butied by squirrels often develop 

 into nut-bearing trees. 



